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With
approximately 12,000 employees and, as it boasts, “10+ yearssecuringthe world’s most challenging borders,” Elbit produces
an arsenal of “homeland security systems.” These include surveillance land
vehicles, mini-unmanned aerial systems, and “smart fences,” highly fortified
steel barriers that have the ability to sense a person’s touch or movement. In
its role as lead system integrator for Israel’s border technology plan, the
company has already installed smart fences in the West Bank and the Golan
Heights.

In
Arizona, with up to a billion dollars potentially at its disposal, CBP has
tasked Elbit with creating a “wall” of “integrated fixed towers” containing the
latest in cameras, radar, motion sensors, and control rooms. Construction will
start in the rugged, desert canyons around Nogales. Once a DHS evaluation deems
that part of the project effective, the rest will be built to monitor the full
length of the state’s borderlands with Mexico. Keep in mind, however, that
these towers are only one part of a broader operation, theArizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan. At this stage,
it’s essentially a blueprint for an unprecedented infrastructure of high-tech
border fortifications that has attracted the attention of many companies.

This is not the first time Israeli companies have been
involved in a U.S. border build-up. In fact, in 2004, Elbit’s Hermes drones
were the first unmanned aerial vehicles to take to the skies topatrolthe southern border. In 2007,
according to Naomi Klein inThe Shock Doctrine, the Golan Group, an Israeli
consulting company made up of former IDF Special Forces officers,providedan intensive eight-day course for
special DHS immigration agents covering “everything from hand-to-hand combat to
target practice to ‘getting proactive with their SUV.’” The Israeli company
NICE Systems evensuppliedArizona’sJoe Arpaio,“America’s toughest sheriff,” with a
surveillance system to watch one of his jails.

As such
border cooperation intensified, journalist Jimmy Johnsoncoinedthe apt phrase “Palestine-Mexico
border” to catch what was happening. In 2012, Arizona state legislators,sensingthe
potential economic benefit of this growing collaboration, declared their desert
state and Israel to be natural “trade partners,” adding that it was “a
relationship we seek to enhance.”

In this
way, the doors were opened to a new world order in which the United States and
Israel are to become partners in the “laboratory” that is the U.S.-Mexican
borderlands. Its testing grounds are to be in Arizona. There, largely through a
program known asGlobal Advantage, American academic and corporate knowhow and
Mexican low-wage manufacturing are to fuse with Israel’s border and homeland
security companies.

The
Border: Open for Business

No one may
frame the budding romance between Israel’s high-tech companies and Arizona
better than Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. “If you go to Israel and you come
to Southern Arizona and close your eyes and spin yourself a few times,” he
says, “you might not be able to tell the difference.”

Global
Advantage is a business project based on a partnership between the University
of Arizona’s Tech Parks Arizona and the Offshore Group, a business advisory and
housing firm which offers “nearshore solutions for manufacturers of any size”
just across the border in Mexico. Tech Parks Arizona has the lawyers,
accountants, and scholars, as well as the technical knowhow, to help any
foreign company land softly and set up shop in the state. It will aid that
company in addressing legal issues, achieving regulatory compliance, and even
finding qualified employees -- and through a program it’s called the Israel
Business Initiative, Global Advantage has identified its target country.

Think of
it as the perfect example of a post-NAFTA world in which companies dedicated to
stopping border crossers are ever freer to cross the same borders themselves.
In the spirit of free trade that created the NAFTA treaty, the latest border
fortification programs are designed to eliminate borders when it comes to
letting high-tech companies from across the seas set up in the United States
and make use of Mexico’s manufacturing base to create their products. While
Israel and Arizona may be separated by thousands of miles, Rothschild assuredTomDispatchthat in “economics, there are no
borders.”

Of course,
what the mayor appreciates, above all, is the way new border technology could
bring money and jobs into an area with a nearly 23% poverty rate. How those
jobs might be created matters far less to him. According to Molly Gilbert, the
director of community engagement for the Tech Parks Arizona, “It’s really about
development, and we want to create technology jobs in our borderlands.”

So
consider it anything but an irony that, in this developing global set of
boundary-busting partnerships, the factories that will produce the border
fortresses designed by Elbit and other Israeli and U.S. high-tech firms will
mainly be located in Mexico. Ill-paid Mexican blue-collar workers will, then,
manufacture the very components of a future surveillance regime, which may well
help locate, detain, arrest, incarcerate, and expel some of them if they try to
cross into the United States.

Think of
Global Advantage as a multinational assembly line, a place where homeland
security meets NAFTA. Right now there are reportedly 10 to 20 Israeli companies
in active discussion about joining the program. Bruce Wright, the CEO of Tech
Parks Arizona, tellsTomDispatchthat his organization has a
“nondisclosure” agreement with any companies that sign on and so cannot reveal
their names.

Though
cautious about officially claiming success for Global Advantage’s Israel
Business Initiative, Wright brims with optimism about his organization’s
cross-national planning. As he talks in a conference room located on the
1,345-acre park on the southern outskirts of Tucson, it’s apparent that he's
buoyed by predictions that the Homeland Security market will grow from a $51
billion annual business in 2012 to$81 billionin
the United States alone by 2020, and$544 billionworldwide
by 2018.

Wright
knows as well that submarkets for border-related products like video
surveillance, non-lethal weaponry, and people-screening technologies are all
advancing rapidly and that the U.S. market for drones is poised to create
70,000 new jobs by 2016. Partially fueling this growth is what theAssociated Presscalls an“unheralded shift”to
drone surveillance on the U.S. southern divide. More than 10,000 drone flights
have been launched into border air space since March 2013, with plans for many
more, especially after the Border Patrol doubles its fleet.

When
Wright speaks, it’s clear he knows that his park sits atop a
twenty-first-century gold mine. As he sees it, Southern Arizona, aided by his
tech park, will become the perfect laboratory for the first cluster of border
security companies in North America. He’s not only thinking about the 57
southern Arizona companies already identified as working in border security and
management, but similar companies nationwide and across the globe, especially
in Israel.

In fact,
Wright's aim is to follow Israel’s lead, as it is now the number-one place for
such groupings. In his case, the Mexican border would simply replace that
country’s highly marketed Palestinian testing grounds. The 18,000 linear feet
that surround the tech park’s solar panel farm would, for example, be a perfect
spot to test out motion sensors. Companies could also deploy, evaluate, and
test their products “in the field,” as he likes to say -- that is, where real
people are crossing real borders -- just as Elbit Systems did before CBP gave it
the contract.

“If we’re
going to be in bed with the border on a day-to-day basis, with all of its
problems and issues, and there’s a solution to it,” Wright said in a 2012
interview, “why shouldn’t we be the place where the issue is solved and we get
the commercial benefit from it?”

From
the Battlefield to the Border

When Naomi
Weiner, project coordinator for the Israel Business Initiative, returned from a
trip to that country with University of Arizona researchers in tow, she
couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about the possibilities for collaboration.
She arrived back in November, just a day before Obama announced his new
executive actions -- a promising declaration for those, like her, in the
business of bolstering border defenses.

“We’ve
chosen areas where Israel is very strong and Southern Arizona is very strong,”
Weiner explained toTomDispatch,
pointing to the surveillance industry “synergy” between the two places. For
example, one firm her team met with in Israel wasBrightway Vision,
a subsidiary of Elbit Systems. If it decides to set up shop in Arizona, it
could use tech park expertise to further develop and refine its thermal imaging
cameras and goggles, while exploring ways to repurpose those military products
for border surveillance applications. The Offshore Group would then manufacture
the cameras and goggles in Mexico.

Arizona,
as Weiner puts it, possesses the “complete package” for such Israeli companies.
“We’re sitting right on the border, close to Fort Huachuca,” a nearby military
base where, among other things, technicians control the drones surveilling the
borderlands. “We have the relationship with Customs and Border Protection, so
there’s a lot going on here. And we’re also the Center of Excellence on
Homeland Security.”

Weiner is
referring to the fact that, in 2008, DHS designated the University of Arizona
the lead school for theCenter of Excellenceon Border Security and Immigration.
Thanks to that, it has since received millions of dollars in federal grants.
Focusing on research and development of border-policing technologies, the
center is a place where, among other things, engineers are studying locust
wings in order to create miniature drones equipped with cameras that can get
into the tiniest of spaces near ground level, while large drones like the
Predator B continue to buzz over the borderlands at 30,000 feet (despite the
fact that arecent auditby
the inspector general of homeland security found them a waste of money).

Although
the Arizona-Israeli romance is still in the courtship stage, excitement about
its possibilities is growing. Officials from Tech Parks Arizona see Global
Advantage as the perfect way to strengthen the U.S.-Israel “special
relationship.” There is no other place in the world with a higher concentration
of homeland security tech companies than Israel. Six hundred tech start-ups are
launched in Tel Aviv alone every year. During the Gaza offensive last summer,Bloombergreportedthat
investment in such companies had “actually accelerated.” However, despite the
periodic military operations in Gaza and the incessant build-up of the Israeli
homeland security regime, there are serious limitations to the local market.

The
Israeli Ministry of Economy is painfully aware of this. Its officials know that
the growth of the Israeli economy is “largely fueledby
a steady increase in exports and foreign investment.” The government coddles,
cultivates, and supports these start-up tech companies until their products are
market-ready. Among them have been innovations like the “skunk,” a liquid with
a putrid odor meant to stop unruly crowds in their tracks. The ministry has
also been successful in taking such products to market across the globe. In the
decade following 9/11, sales of Israeli “security exports” rose from $2 billion to $7 billion annually.

Israeli
companies have sold surveillance drones to Latin American countries likeMexico, Chile, andColombia, and massive security systems to India and Brazil,
where an electro-optic surveillance system will be deployed along the country’s
borders with Paraguay and Bolivia. They have also been involved in preparations
for policing the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. The products of Elbit Systems and its
subsidiaries are now in use from the Americas and Europe to Australia.
Meanwhile, that mammoth security firm is ever more involved in finding
“civilian applications” for its war technologies. It is also ever more
dedicated to bringing the battlefield to the world’s borderlands, including
southern Arizona.

As
geographer Joseph Nevinsnotes, although there are many differences between the
political situations of the U.S. and Israel, both Israel-Palestine and Arizona
share a focus on keeping out “those deemed permanent outsiders,” whether
Palestinians, undocumented Latin Americans, or indigenous people.

Mohyeddin
Abdulaziz has seen this “special relationship” from both sides, as a
Palestinian refugee whose home and village Israeli military forces destroyed in
1967 and as a long-time resident of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. A founding
member of the Southern Arizona BDS Network, whose goal is to pressure U.S.
divestment from Israeli companies, Abdulaziz opposes any program like Global
Advantage that will contribute to the further militarization of the border,
especially when it also sanitizes Israel’s “violations of human rights and
international law.”

Such
violations matter little, of course, when there is money to be made, as
Brigadier General Elkabetz indicated at that 2012 border technology conference.
Given the direction that both the U.S. and Israel are taking when it comes to
their borderlands, the deals being brokered at the University of Arizona look
increasingly like matches made in heaven (or perhaps hell). As a result,
there is truth packed into journalist Dan Cohen’s comment that “Arizona is the
Israel of the United States.”

Gabriel
M. Schivone, a writer from Tucson, has worked as a humanitarian volunteer in
the Mexico-U.S. borderlands for more than six years. He blogs atElectronic IntifadaandHuffington Post's"Latino Voices."
His articles have appeared in theArizona
Daily Star,theArizona Republic, StudentNation,theGuardian, andMcClatchy Newspapers, among other
publications. You can follow him on Twitter@GSchivone.

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